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LexBlog to compete with LexisNexis and FindLaw via quality products and viral marketing

September 29, 2005

Online viral marketing is more powerful than the old way of big and expensive marketing campaigns for inferior services and products is the essence of Seth Godin’s latest post.

The bottom line is that it’s way way easier to start things than it used to be (opening a movie big costs a tenth of a billion dollars, while opening a blog costs about twenty). The natural, user-driven networks that make a product succeed or fail rarely hit all at once. But the snowball effect online is far more powerful than the old-world scream & dream approach.

So, what’s it mean to you?

  • Make something worth making.
  • Sell something worth talking about.
  • Believe in what you do because you may have to do it for a long time before it catches on.
  • Don’t listen to the first people who give you feedback.
  • Don’t give up. Not for a while, anyway.

Next week, LexBlog takes its next step in the growth of the company. We’ll open our Bozeman, Montana office with a heck of a team I’ll be introducing soon. LexBlog has attracted such talented folks because we’re making something worth making, we believe in what we do, we don’t listen to the blog naysayers and we’re not going to give up.

Best of all, the growth of this profitable company is the result of this blog and the support of our clients. We don’t have offices and cubes filled with marketing, advertising, PR and sales people. I started talking about using blogs for marketing legal services to an audience of one – me – back in November, 2003. Now, almost 1,000 posts later, many of the largest law firms as well as skilled small firm practitioners across the country are using blogs produced by LexBlog.

Now FindLaw, a web developer for lawyers among other things, is selling something that with a long stretch could be described as a blog product. LexisNexis Martindale-Hubbell, a lawyer directory which foolishly boasts to be the leading client development company for the legal profession, will surely follow with a blog product driven by profits and not quality. Other developers who pooh-poohed blogs earlier this year will jump on the blog bandwagon to keep up with the Joneses.

It’ll be a good fight but for the reasons Seth cites, I like LexBlog’s chances of remaining the leading provider of professional marketing blogs to the legal profession.

Now I have to get back to playing catch up on serving our existing clients. We’re not bringing on more troops for nothing.

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